Yes, unbelievable. That is what de-funding and zero-based budgeting should be all about. Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute. If this is their work product, while competing for scarce resources, then out they go.

Maybe the leaders of Iran and Israel and Saudi Arabia can form a band. How about a middle east rap gang? They can curse each other out with rap lyrics. Someone I know can write them and maybe win a Noble Peace Prize.

I would argue that children have an unfair circumstance by design under polygamy. The adults may have consented, but the kids did not. Society is better off and stronger when we choose a spouse to form a family instead of just keep adding spouses and forming 'families'. (The NBA is not aware of this rule.)

In this day where anything goes, who are we to judge. Gay marriage ended of the meaning of marriage (and family) - one man and one woman become one married couple, husband and wife, sometimes becoming a family with one mom, one dad and children. If we cannot restrict on gender, why limit the numbers. If it has no meaning, why even keep track or acknowledge marriages.

State references or preferences to marriage are all discriminatory by design - against all unmarrieds, not just against gays and polygamists. The point of laws allowing the states to sanction marriage of the old type was that this particular discrimination and preference was good for society. Each person in a free society also had the freedom to not enter a single spouse, opposite gender union with all its recognized advantages.

The irony here is that if same sex marriages were allowed in ND, the polygamist action wouldn't be:

"North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem filed a legal opinion last week confirming that the state does not recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages, allowing a man married to another man to come to North Dakota and marry a woman without divorcing his husband."

I like and respect Dennis Prager a lot, but though I agree with the essence of his conclusion here, I note that out of disgust for just how far we have taken the notion of prohibiting discrimination, I would consider going much further and simply say "We are free to choose with whom we associate and with whom we do business. Period."

Jack Phillips owns the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., about 10 miles from downtown Denver. In July 2012, two gay men, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, asked Phillips to provide the cake for their wedding celebration. Though same-sex marriage is not allowed in Colorado — the Colorado Constitution states that “Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state” — the two men had been married in Massachusetts.

As acknowledged by all parties, Phillips told the men, “I’ll make you birthday cakes, shower cakes, sell you cookies and brownies, I just don’t make cakes for same-sex weddings.”

Jack Phillips is an evangelical Christian, and his religion does not allow him to participate in same-sex marriages or celebrations of same-sex marriages.

In other words, Phillips made it clear from the outset that he does not discriminate based on the sexual orientation of a prospective customer. He will knowingly sell his products to any gay person who wishes to purchase his baked goods.

Nevertheless, Craig and Mullins went to the ACLU, which then sued Phillips. On Dec. 6, administrative law Judge Robert N. Spencer handed down his decision:

“The undisputed facts show that Respondents [Masterpiece Cakeshop] discriminated against Complainants [Craig and Mullins] because of their sexual orientation by refusing to sell them a wedding cake for their same-sex marriage, in violation of ? 24-34-601(2), C.R.S.”

The section of the C.R.S. (Colorado Revised Statutes) cited by Judge Spencer reads:

“It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful for a person, directly or indirectly, to refuse, withhold from, or deny to an individual or a group, because of … sexual orientation … the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation.”

Thus, under penalty of fines and, potentially, jail:

1. Jack Phillips must participate in an event that the Colorado constitution explicitly prohibits.

2. He must do so against deeply held religious convictions.

3. He must do so despite the fact that there are hundreds of other cake makers in the Denver area.

Those who support this decision argue that religious principles do not apply here: What if, for example, someone’s religious principles prohibited interracial marriages? Should that individual be allowed to deny services to an interracial wedding?

Of course not.

Here’s why that objection is irrelevant:

1. No religion practiced in America — indeed, no world religion — has ever banned interracial marriage. That some American Christians opposed interracial marriage is of no consequence. No one assumes that every position held by any member of a religion means that the religion holds that position.

2. If opposition to same-sex marriage is not a legitimately held religious conviction, there is no such thing as a legitimately held religious position. Unlike opposition to interracial marriage, opposition to same-sex marriage has been the position of every religion in recorded history — as well as of every country and every American state until the 21st century.

3. The Colorado baker made it clear to the gay couple — as acknowledged by the court — that he would be happy to bake and sell cakes to these gay men any other time they wanted. Therefore, he is not discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation. He readily sells to people he knows to be gay. What he is unwilling to do is to participate in an (SET ITAL) event (END ITAL) that he opposes for legitimate religious reasons. Until, at the most, 10 years ago, no one would have imagined that a person could be forced to provide goods or services for a same-sex wedding.

4. If a baker refused on religious grounds to provide the wedding cake for a polygamous wedding, should the state force him to do so? If a baker refused to provide a cake to a heterosexual couple that was celebrating living together without getting married, should the state force him to?

Some years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote a bestseller titled “Liberal Fascism.” If you think that title is an exaggeration, read the book. Or just watch what liberals are doing to those who oppose same-sex marriage.

The irony here is that if same sex marriages were allowed in ND, the polygamist action wouldn't be:

"North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem filed a legal opinion last week confirming that the state does not recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages, allowing a man married to another man to come to North Dakota and marry a woman without divorcing his husband."

It wasn't the people of North Dakota who changed the meaning of marriage or changed any laws, and it looks to me like their AG applied the laws properly. DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act signed by Democrat President Clinton) makes it so that individual states do not legally have to acknowledge the relationships of gay and lesbian couples who were married in another state. Only the section of DOMA that dealt with federal recognition was ruled unconstitutional. What a tangled web the leftists and enabling jurists weave.

I agree with ccp, "To me the left has simply made a mockery out of marriage".

The Left adopted LGBT instead of just gay as the oppressed group with the intention of going after acceptance and public endorsement for thems too, with their various, multiple partner arrangements.

BD, others, are you not sympathetic to the discrimination suffered by mulitple-partner-Americans and their right, just like single partner heteros, to marry whomever they choose? Have they not suffered in the dark shadows of this country long enough.

Or does what the smartest and most widely traveled Secretary of State in history once shouted regarding Benghazi apply now to marriage: "AT THIS POINT...WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE??"

Before the Nazis murdered six million Jews, they called them rats and vermin. Before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Hutu leaders declared that all Tutsi men, women and children were inyenzi, cockroaches. Today, similarly dehumanizing language is surging in countries like Burma, Greece, Nigeria and Iran—and history teaches that it can inspire mass violence if left unchecked.

Such inflammatory speech is launched from a variety of platforms: newspapers, broadcasts, pulpits, the Web, and even text messages. It's the content that's strikingly similar. In dozens of languages, human beings are described as less than human. The inciters say these pests must be eliminated as a matter of self-preservation.

In Burma, a Buddhist monk who leads the nationalist 969 Movement has compared the country's Muslim minority to "mad dogs" and African carp that "breed quickly" and are "very violent." Last March, Buddhists rampaged through a Muslim community in the city of Meiktila, torching houses and killing more than 20 people including children. The monk, Wirathu, called the violence "a show of strength."Enlarge Image

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

In Greece, the fascist group Golden Dawn has risen in the past few years from a fringe group to a political party with 18 seats in parliament. It ran on a platform promising to "rid Greece of the stench" of immigrants. Ilias Panagiotaris, a Golden Dawn parliamentarian, vowed at a rally before the June 2012 election that the group would "carry out raids on hospitals and kindergartens and it will throw immigrants and their children out on the street so that Greeks can take their place." Golden Dawn members have indeed carried out beatings and stabbings. Since the 2012 election, 71 violent attacks have been attributed to Golden Dawn according to the country's ombudsman—including the fatal stabbing in September of the antiracist rapper Pavlos Fissas.

In Nigeria, ongoing violence between Christians and Muslims has been fueled by inflammatory messages from both communities. In 2010, in the city of Jos, text messages warned Christians not to buy food from Muslims "because it was poisoned." Hundreds of people were killed in subsequent riots. Since 1999, more than 14,000 people have been killed in such interreligious violence, according to the U.S Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Then there is Iran, a country where dehumanizing speech is coming directly from the government itself. In a speech Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered to the Basij paramilitary organization on Nov. 20, he returned to tropes that have long been a staple of Iran's leading religious and political figures. Mr. Khamenei referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a "rabid dog" and attacked European leaders for supporting Israel. They are "cringing before this creature," he said, "which is not worthy of the name of a human being, before these leaders of the Zionist regime, who look like beasts and who cannot be called human."

Such cases challenge leaders around the world who should be aware by now that speech can catalyze not just violence, but genocide.

Some countries respond with either censorship or punishment. Greece, for example, is attempting the latter with a proposed law against hate speech. But this won't solve the problem. Prosecuting extremist speakers can simply amplify their messages, and it's nearly impossible to suppress speech now that it spreads so quickly online.

A better method is for influential leaders to rebuke inflammatory speakers unequivocally and publicly. Yet neither foreign nor local leaders have forcefully condemned this incendiary rhetoric in a single one of these cases. Leaders in Burma, for instance, have been silent about torrents of anti-Muslim speech, even after they have been followed by killings.

Emphatic "counter-speech" may work. In Kenya, after months of inflammatory speech by politicians and community leaders pitting members of the Kikuyu, Luo and Kalenjin tribes against one another, and a disputed election in late 2007, violence broke out and more than 1,000 people were killed. When the country held its next presidential election on March 4, 2013, Kenyan leaders—political, religious, cultural and even athletes—spoke out against violence and violent speech. Despite another tense, close race and disputed results, there was no eruption of violence.

Directly confronting purveyors of hate and dehumanization offers the best hope of stopping the language that can escalate into physical violence. The responsibility to do so is one that leaders of all stripes, not just government officials, must not shirk.

— Ms. Benesch founded the Dangerous Speech Project, and serves as the Edith Everett Genocide Prevention Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Mr. Abramowitz directs the Museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide.

Friday DigestDecember 20, 2013 Publisher's NoteThis is our last Digest of 2013. As is our custom, we take leave between Christmas and New Year's to be with our families. Our next edition will be on Friday, Jan. 3, 2014.A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!THE FOUNDATION"Conscience is the most sacred of all property." --James MadisonCULTURE, SCIENCE & FAITHA&E Fires Phil

"Duck Dynasty" star and patriarch Phil Robertson came face to face with the political correctness police at A&E again this week when he dared to go "off script" during a GQ interview.

Last May, the network requested that the #1 show in cable TV history eliminate its references to God and guns, but Phil said no: "God and guns are part of our everyday lives [and] to remove either of them from the show is unacceptable. If we can't pray to God on the show, then we will not do the show."

Responding to a question about sin in the current edition of GQ, Phil replied in his colloquial manner, "Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there." He then paraphrased 1 Corinthians: "Don't be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers -- they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right."

The reaction from the two most infamous proponents of gender confusion and homosexual normalization was swift and predictable. The so-called "Human Rights" Campaign protested, "Phil Robertson's remarks are not consistent with the values of our faith communities or the scientific findings of leading medical organizations. We also know that Americans of faith follow the Golden Rule -- treating others with the respect and dignity you'd wish to be treated with. As a role model on a show that attracts millions of viewers, Phil Robertson has a responsibility to set a positive example for young Americans."

Well, we think Phil did set a positive example for young Americans!

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation complained, "Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil's lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe. He clearly knows nothing about gay people or the majority of Louisianans ... who support [them]." They accused Robertson of "vile and extreme stereotypes" and "hateful anti-gay comments."

If you want a good resource for "what true Christians believe," don't start with GLAAD, start with Scripture. Both the Old and New Testaments are crystal clear on the subject, as Mark Alexander outlined in detail in his commentary, "Gender Identity, the Homosexual Agenda and the Christian Response."

As for "the majority of Louisianans," Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal clarified, "Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the state of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints -- except those they disagree with. I don't agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended."

Indeed, A&E immediately surrendered: "We are extremely disappointed to have read Phil Robertson's comments. The A&E Networks have always been strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community. The network has placed Phil under hiatus from filming indefinitely."

Phil responded, "My mission today is to go forth and tell people about why I follow Christ and also what the Bible teaches, and part of that teaching is that women and men are meant to be together. However, I would never treat anyone with disrespect just because they are different from me. We are all created by the Almighty and like Him, I love all of humanity. We would all be better off if we loved God and loved each other."

The Robertson family responded, "We want to thank all of you for your prayers and support. The family has spent much time in prayer since learning of A&E's decision. We want you to know that first and foremost we are a family rooted in our faith in God and our belief that the Bible is His word. Phil's ... beliefs are grounded in the teachings of the Bible. Phil is a Godly man who follows what the Bible says are the greatest commandments: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart' and 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Phil would never incite or encourage hate. We are disappointed that Phil has been placed on hiatus for expressing his faith. As a family, we cannot imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helm."

In other words, they just put A&E on notice.

When it comes to opposing the homosexual agenda, Christians are now routinely condemned for speaking their beliefs. But the tyranny of political correctness is anathema to America itself, and enslaving all of us to a particular code of thought deemed acceptable to leftists is no different from any other kind of slavery.

The Humanities Have Forgotten Their HumanityWhen Shakespeare lost out to 'rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class' at UCLA, something vital was harmed.Heather Mac DonaldJan. 3, 2014 6:43 p.m. ET

In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles wrecked its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization itself.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the "Empire," UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.

In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to "alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class."Enlarge Image

Powell Library and Royce Hall, UCLA campus Getty Images

Such defenestrations have happened elsewhere, and long before 2011. But the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the school's English department was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature, uncorrupted by an ideological overlay. Precisely for that reason, it was the most popular English major in the country, enrolling a whopping 1,400 undergraduates.

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.

Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA's undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.

Not so long ago, colleges still reflected the humanist tradition, which was founded not on narcissism but on the all-consuming desire to engage with the genius and radical difference of the past. The 14th-century Florentine poet Francesco Petrarch triggered the explosion of knowledge known today as Renaissance humanism with his discovery of Livy's monumental history of Rome and the letters of Cicero, the Roman statesman whose orations, with their crystalline Latin style, would inspire such philosophers of republicanism as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

But Petrarch wanted to converse with the ancients as well as read them. So he penned heartfelt letters in Latin to Virgil, Seneca, Horace and Homer, among others, informing them of the fate of their writings and of Rome itself. After rebuking Cicero for the vindictiveness revealed in his letters, Petrarch repented and wrote him again: "I fear that my last letter has offended you. . . . But I feel I know you as intimately as if I had always lived with you."

In 1416, the Florentine clerk Poggio Bracciolini discovered the most important Roman treatise on rhetoric moldering in a monastery library outside Constance, a find of such value that a companion exclaimed: "Oh wondrous treasure, oh unexpected joy!"

Bracciolini thought of himself as rescuing a still-living being. The treatise's author, Quintilian, would have "perished shortly if we hadn't brought him aid . . ." Bracciolini wrote to a friend in Verona. "There is not the slightest doubt that that man, so brilliant, genteel, tasteful, refined, and pleasant, could not longer have endured the squalor of that place and the cruelty of those jailors."

This burning drive to recover a lost culture propelled the Renaissance humanists into remote castles and monasteries to search for long-forgotten manuscripts. The knowledge that many ancient texts were forever lost filled these scholars with despair. Nevertheless, they exulted in their growing repossession of classical learning.

In François Rabelais's exuberant stories from the 1530s, the giant Gargantua sends off his son to study in Paris, joyfully conjuring up the languages—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldean and Arabic—that he expects his son to master, as well as the vast range of history, law, natural history and philosophy.

This constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present would become a defining feature of Western civilization, prompting the evolution of such radical ideas as constitutional government and giving birth to arts and architecture of polyphonic complexity. And it became the primary mission of the universities to transmit knowledge of the past, as well as—eventually—to serve as seedbeds for new knowledge.

Compare the humanists' hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate, who had been required by the school's core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, "across gender, sexuality, race and class."

"Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?" she groused in a discussion of the curriculum reported by David Denby in "Great Books," his 1997 account of re-enrolling in Columbia's core curriculum. "My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It's a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of color." These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today.

W.E.B. Du Bois would have been stunned to learn how narrow is the contemporary multiculturalist's self-definition and sphere of interest. Du Bois, living during America's darkest period of hate, nevertheless heartbreakingly affirmed in 1903 his intellectual and spiritual affinity with all of Western civilization: "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension."

It is no wonder, then, that we have been hearing of late that the humanities are in crisis. A recent Harvard report from a committee co-chaired by the school's premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented that 57% of incoming Harvard students who initially declare interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something by Professor Bhabha: "If the problematic 'closure' of textuality questions the totalization of national culture. . . ." How soon before that student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley?

No, the only true justification for the humanities is that they provide the thing that Faust sold his soul for: knowledge. It is knowledge of a particular kind, concerning what men have done and created over the ages.

The American Founders drew on an astonishingly wide range of historical sources and an appropriately jaundiced view of human nature to craft the world's most stable and free republic. They invoked lessons learned from the Greek city-states, the Carolingian Dynasty and the Ottoman Empire in the Constitution's defense. And they assumed that the new nation's citizens would themselves be versed in history and political philosophy.

But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one's narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one's own than never to have done so. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: A man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature, music and all the humanities and arts. These forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience—society on a 19th-century Russian feudal estate, for example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne.

Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. And as politics grow ever more unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with some consolation: There is no greater lesson from the past than the intractability of human folly.

Ms. Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This article is adapted from the Winter 2014 issue of City Journal and based on the author's Wriston Lecture for the Manhattan Institute.

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE January 9, 2014 4:00 AMThe White GhettoIn Appalachia the country is beautiful and the society is broken. By Kevin D. Williamson

Owsley County, Ky. – There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation, as peasants. Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short — the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. — and they are getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007.

If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation.

Driving through these hills and hollows, you aren’t in the Appalachia of Elmore Leonard’s Justified or squatting with Lyndon Johnson on Tom Fletcher’s front porch in Martin County, a scene famously photographed by Walter Bennett of Time, the image that launched the so-called War on Poverty. The music isn’t “Shady Grove,” it’s Kanye West. There is still coal mining — which, at $25 an hour or more, provides one of the more desirable occupations outside of government work — but the jobs are moving west, and Harlan County, like many coal-country communities, has lost nearly half of its population over the past 30 years.

There is here a strain of fervid and sometimes apocalyptic Christianity, and visions of the Rapture must have a certain appeal for people who already have been left behind. Like its black urban counterparts, the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. As they go, businesses disappear, institutions fall into decline, social networks erode, and there is little or nothing left over for those who remain. It’s a classic economic death spiral: The quality of the available jobs is not enough to keep good workers, and the quality of the available workers is not enough to attract good jobs. These little towns located at remote wide spots in helical mountain roads are hard enough to get to if you have a good reason to be here. If you don’t have a good reason, you aren’t going to think of one.

Appalachian places have evocative and unsentimental names denoting deep roots: Little Barren River, Coal Pit Road. The name “Cumberland” blankets Appalachian geography — the Cumberland Mountains, the Cumberland River, several Cumberland counties — in tribute to the Duke of Cumberland, who along with the Ulster Scots ancestors of the Appalachian settlers crushed the Young Pretender at the Battle of Culloden. Even church names suggest ancient grievances: Separate Baptist, with the descriptor in all-capital letters. (“Come out from among them and be ye separate” — 2 Corinthians 6:17.) I pass a church called “Welfare Baptist,” which, unfortunately, describes much of the population for miles and miles around.

* * *

There is not much novelty in Booneville, Ky., the seat of Owsley County, but it does receive a steady trickle of visitors: Its public figures suffer politely through a perverse brand of tourism from journalists and do-gooders every time the U.S. Census data are recalculated and it defends its dubious title as poorest county in these United States. The first person I encounter is Jimmy — I think he’s called Jimmy; there is so much alcohol and Kentucky in his voice that I have a hard time understanding him — who is hanging out by the steps of the local municipal building waiting for something to happen, and what happens today is me. Unprompted, he breaks away from the little knot of men he is standing with and comes at me smiling hard. He appears to be one of those committed dipsomaniacs of the sort David Foster Wallace had in mind when he observed that at a certain point in a drunk’s career it does not matter all that much whether he’s actually been drinking, that’s just the way he is. Jimmy is attached to one of the clusters of unbusy men who lounge in front of the public buildings in Booneville – “old-timers with nothing to do,” one observer calls them, though some of those “old-timers” do not appear to have reached 30 yet, and their Mossy Oak camouflage outfits say “Remington” while their complexions say “Nintendo.” Mossy Oak and Realtree camo are aesthetic touchstones in these parts: I spot a new $50,000 Ram pickup truck with an exterior as shiny as a silver ingot and a camouflage interior, the usefulness of which is non-obvious.

I expect Jimmy to ask for money, but instead he launches into a long disquisition about something called the “Thread the Needle” program, and relates with great animation how he convinced a lady acquaintance of his to go down to the county building and offer to sign up for Thread the Needle, telling her that she would receive $25 or $50 for doing so.

“‘Thread the Needle!’ I told her,” he says. “Right? Right?” He pantomimes threading a needle. He laughs. I don’t quite get it. So he tells the story again in what I assume are more or less the exact same slurred words. “Right?”

“Right . . .”

“But they ain’t no Thread the Needle program! I play pranks!”

I get it: Advising friends to go down to the county building to sign up for imaginary welfare programs is Jimmy’s personal entertainment. He’s too old for World of Warcraft and too drunk for the Shoutin’ Happy Mission Ministry.

It’s not like he has a lot of appealing options, though. There used to be two movie theaters here — a regular cinema and a drive-in. Both are long gone. The nearest Walmart is nearly an hour away. There’s no bookstore, the nearest Barnes & Noble being 55 miles away and the main source of reading matter being the horrifying/hilarious crime blotter in the local weekly newspaper. Within living memory, this town had three grocery stores, a Western Auto and a Napa Auto Parts, a feed store, a lumber store, a clothing shop, a Chrysler dealership, a used-car dealership, a skating rink — even a discotheque, back in the 1970s. Today there is one grocery store, and the rest is as dead as disco. If you want a newsstand or a dinner at Applebee’s, gas up the car. Amazon may help, but delivery can be tricky — the nearest UPS drop-box is 17 miles away, the nearest FedEx office 34 miles away.

If you go looking for the catastrophe that laid this area low, you’ll eventually discover a terrifying story: Nothing happened. It’s not like this was a company town in which the business around which life was organized went toes-up. Booneville and Owsley County were never economic powerhouses. They were sustained for a time in part by a nearby Midsouth plant, which manufactured consumer electronics such as steam irons and toaster ovens, as well as industrial supplies such as refrigerator parts. A former employee estimates that a majority of Owsley County households owed part of their income to Midsouth at one time or another, until a mishap in the sanding room put an end to that: “Those shavings are just like coal dust,” he says. “It will go right up if it gets a spark.” Operations were consolidated in a different facility, a familiar refrain here — a local branch of the health department consolidated operations in a different town, along with the energy company and others. But Owsley County was poor before, during, and after that period. Coal mining was for years a bulwark against utter economic ruination, but regulation, a lengthy permitting process, and other factors both economic and geological pushed what remains of the region’s coal business away toward other communities. After they spend a winter or two driving an hour or two each way over icy twists of unforgiving mountain asphalt, many locals working in the coal business decide it is easier to move to where the work is, leaving Owsley County, where unemployment already is 150 percent of the national average, a little more desperate and collectively jobless than before. It’s possible that a coal worker’s moving from Booneville to Pikeville would lower the median income of both towns.

Some hope that a long-awaited highway-improvement program will revitalize the town by making the drive a little less terrifying — the local police chief admits with some chagrin that he recently found himself heading down the road in panicked spins after encountering a patch of early-November black ice, which clings to the high and shady places. But the fact is, KY-30 is a two-way road, and there are still more reasons to leave Owsley County than to go there.

A few locals drive two hours — on a good day, more on others — to report for work in the Toyota factory at Georgetown, Ky., which means driving all the way through the Daniel Boone National Forest and through the city of Lexington to reach the suburbs on the far side. As with the coal miners traveling past Hazard or even farther, eventually many of those Toyota workers decide that the suburbs of Lexington are about as far as they want to go. The employed and upwardly mobile leave, taking their children, their capital, and their habits with them, clean clear of the Big White Ghetto, while the unemployed, the dependent, and the addicted are once again left behind.“We worked before,” the former Midsouth man says. “We’d work again.”* * *“Well, you try paying that much for a case of pop,” says the irritated proprietor of a nearby café, who is curt with whoever is on the other end of the telephone but greets customers with the perfect manners that small-town restaurateurs reliably develop. I don’t think much of that overheard remark at the time, but it turns out that the local economy runs on black-market soda the way Baghdad ran on contraband crude during the days of sanctions.

It works like this: Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices.

Last year, 18 big-city mayors, Mike Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel among them, sent the federal government a letter asking that soda be removed from the list of items eligible to be used for EBT purchases. Mayor Bloomberg delivered his standard sermon about obesity, nutrition, and the multiplex horrors of sugary drinks. But none of those mayors gets what’s really going on with sugar water and food stamps. Take soda off the list and there will be another fungible commodity to take its place. It’s possible that a great many cans of soda used as currency go a long time without ever being cracked — in a town this small, those selling soda to EBT users and those buying it back at half price are bound to be some of the same people, the soda merely changing hands ceremonially to mark the real exchange of value, pillbilly wampum.* * *‘Oh, we’s jes’ pooooor folllllks, we cain’t afford no cornbreaaaaaaad!” So says Booneville police chief Johnny Logsdon, who has an amused glint in his eye and has encountered his share of parachuted-in writers on the poverty beat. A former New York City resident who made his career in the U.S. Navy before following his wife back to her Kentucky home, Chief Logsdon is an outdoorsman and a gifted nature photographer (his work adorns the exterior of the municipal building) who speaks fondly of Staten Island but is clearly in his element in the Kentucky countryside, much of which is arrestingly beautiful.

Chief Logsdon has time to indulge his hobbies because the Big White Ghetto is different from most other ghettos in one very important way: There’s not much violent crime here. There’s a bit of the usual enterprise one finds everywhere there are drugs and poor people, which is to say, everywhere: Police have just broken up a ring of car burglars who had the inspired idea of pulling off their capers during church services, when all the good people were otherwise occupied. (The good people? One victim reported $1,000 in cash missing from the trunk of his car, and I’m putting an asterisk next to his name until I know where that came from.) But even the crime here is pretty well predictable. The chief’s assistant notes that if they know the nature and location of a particular crime, they can more or less drive straight to where the perpetrator, who is likely to be known to them intimately, is to be found. In Owsley County, finally there is a place in which “the usual suspects” is something more than a figure of speech.

There’s a great deal of drug use, welfare fraud, and the like, but the overall crime rate throughout Appalachia is about two-thirds the national average, and the rate of violent crime is half the national average, according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service. Chief Logsdon is justifiably skeptical of the area’s reputation for drug-fueled crime. But he is not blinkered, and his photos of spectacular autumn foliage and delicate baby birds do not denote a sentimental disposition. “We have loggers and coal producers,” he says, dropping the cornpone accent. “We have educators and local businesses, and people in the arts. And we have the same problems they have in every community.” He points out that the town recently opened up a $1 million public library — a substantial investment for a town in which the value of all residential property combined would not add up to the big lottery jackpot being advertised all over. (Lottery tickets, particularly the scratch-off variety, are ubiquitous here.) He does not deny the severity or scope of the region’s problems, but he does think that they are exaggerated by visitors who are here, after all, only because Owsley holds the national title for poorest county. Owsley’s dependent underclass has many of the same problems as any other dependent underclass; but with a poverty rate persistently at the 40 percent mark — or half again as much poverty as in the Bronx — the underclass plays an outsized role in local life. It is not the exception.

Two towns over, I ask a young woman about the local gossip, and she tells me it’s always the same: “Who’s growing weed, who’s not growing weed anymore, who’s cooking meth, whose meth lab got broken into, whose meth lab blew up.” Chief Logsdon thinks I may be talking to the wrong people. “Maybe that’s all they see, because that’s all they know. Ask somebody else and they’ll tell you a different story.” He then gives me a half-joking — but only half — list of people not to talk to: Not the shiftless fellows milling about in the hallways on various government-related errands, not the guy circling the block on a moped. Instead, there’s the lifelong banker whose brother is the head of the school board. There’s the mayor, a sharp nonagenarian who has been in office since the Eisenhower administration.

And that, too, is part of the problem with adverse selection in the Big White Ghetto: For the smart and enterprising people left behind, life can be very comfortable, with family close, a low cost of living, beautiful scenery, and a very short climb to the top of the social pecking order. The relative ease of life for the well-off and connected here makes it easy to overlook the real unpleasant facts of economic life, which helps explain why Booneville has a lovely new golf course, of all things, but so little in the way of everyday necessities. The county seat, run down as parts of it are, is an outpost of civilization compared with what surrounds it for 50 miles in every direction. Stopping for gas on KY-30 a few miles past the Owsley County line, I go looking for the restroom and discover instead that the family operating the place is living in makeshift quarters in the back. Margaret Thatcher lived above her family’s shop as a little girl, too, but a grocer’s in Grantham is a very different thing from a gas station in Kentucky, with very different prospects.

Owsley County had been dry since Prohibition. A close election (632–518) earlier this year changed that, and the local authorities are sorting out the regulatory and licensing issues related to the sale of alcohol. Chief Logsdon thinks that this is, on balance, a good thing, because local prohibition meant that local drunks were on the local roads coming back from bars or liquor stores. “They aren’t waiting until they get home,” he says. “They’re opening the bottle. They’re like kids at Christ¬mas.” Obviously, prohibition wasn’t getting the job done. At the same time, the scene in Owsley County might make even the most ardent libertarian think twice about drug legalization: After all, these addicts are hooked on legal drugs – OxyContin and other prescription opioid analgesics — even if they often are obtained illegally. In nearby Whitley County, nearly half of the examined inmates in one recent screening tested positive for buprenorphine, a.k.a. “prison heroin,” a product originally developed as a treatment for opiate addiction. (Such cures are often worse than the disease: Bayer once owned the trademark on heroin, which it marketed as a cure for morphine addiction — it works.) Fewer drunk drivers would be a good thing, but I have to imagine that the local bar, if Booneville ever gets one, is going to be a grim place.* * *

This isn’t the Kentucky of Elmore Leonard’s imagination, and there is nothing romantic about it. These are no sons and daughters of Andrew Jackson, no fiercely independent remnants of the old America clinging to their homes and their traditional ways. Having once been downwind of a plate of biscuits and squirrel gravy does not make you Daniel Boone. This is not the land of moonshine and hill lore, but that of families of four clutching $40 worth of lotto scratchers and crushing the springs on their beaten-down Camry while getting dinner from a Phillips 66 station.

This is about “the draw.”

“The draw,” the monthly welfare checks that supplement dependents’ earnings in the black-market Pepsi economy, is poison. It’s a potent enough poison to catch the attention even of such people as those who write for the New York Times. Nicholas Kristof, visiting nearby Jackson, Ky., last year, was shocked by parents who were taking their children out of literacy classes because the possibility of improved academic performance would threaten $700-a-month Social Security disability benefits, which increasingly are paid out for nebulous afflictions such as loosely defined learning disorders. “This is painful for a liberal to admit,” Kristof wrote, “but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency.”

There is much here to confound conservatives, too. Jim DeMint likes to say that marriage is our best anti-poverty program, and he also has a point. But a 2004 study found that the majority of impoverished households in Appalachia were headed by married couples, not single mothers. Getting and staying married is not a surefire prophylactic against poverty. Neither are prophylactics. Kentucky has a higher teen-motherhood rate than the national average, but not radically so, and its young mothers are more likely to be married. Kentucky is No. 19 in the ranking of states by teen pregnancy rates, but it is No. 8 when it comes to teen birth rates, according to the Guttmacher Institute, its young women being somewhat less savage than most of their counterparts across the country. Kentucky and West Virginia have abortion rates that are one-fourth those of Rhode Island or Connecticut, and one-fifth that of Florida. More marriage, less abortion: Not exactly the sort of thing out of which conservative indictments are made. But marriage is less economically valuable, at least to men, in Appalachia – like their counterparts elsewhere, married men here earn more than their unmarried counterparts, but the difference is smaller and declining.

In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. It is not as though labor and enterprise are unknown here: Digging coal is hard work, farming is hard work, timbering is hard work — so hard that the best and brightest long ago packed up for Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or Memphis or Houston. There is to this day an Appalachian bar in Detroit and ex-Appalachian enclaves around the country. The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socio¬economic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.

“The government gives people checks, but nobody teaches them how to live,” says Teresa Barrett, a former high-school principal who now publishes the Owsley County newspaper. “You have people on the draw getting $3,000 a month, and they still can’t live. When I was at the school, we’d see kids come in from a long weekend just starved to death. But you’ll see those parents at the grocery store with their 15 cases of Pepsi, and that’s all they’ve got in the buggy — you know what they’re doing. Everybody knows, nobody does anything. And when you have that many people on the draw, that’s a big majority of voters.”

Her advice to young people is to study for degrees that will help them get jobs in the schools or at the local nursing home — or get out. “I would move in a heartbeat,” she says, but she stays for family reasons.

Speaking in the Rose Garden in March of 1965, Lyndon Johnson had high hopes for his Appalachia Bill. “This legislation marks the end of an era of partisan cynicism towards human want and misery. The dole is dead. The pork barrel is gone. Federal and state, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, Americans of these times are concerned with the outcome of the next generation, not the next election. . . . The bill that I will now sign will work no miracles overnight. Whether it works at all depends not upon the federal government alone but the states and the local governments as well.” The dole, as it turns out, is deathless, and the pork barrel has merely been reincarnated as a case of Pepsi. President Johnson left out of his calculations the factor that is almost always overlooked by populists: the people.* * *There is another Booneville, this one in northern Mississippi, just within the cultural orbit of Memphis and a stone’s throw from the two-room shack in which was born Elvis Presley, the Appalachian Adonis. There’s a lot of Big White Ghetto between them, trailers and rickety homes heated with wood stoves, the post-industrial ruins of old mills and small factories with their hard 1970s lines that always make me think of the name of the German musical group Einstürzende Neubauten — “collapsing modern buildings.” (Some things just sound more appropriate in German.) You swerve to miss deer on the country roads, see the rusted hulk of a 1937 Dodge sedan nestled against a house and wonder if somebody was once planning to restore it – or if somebody just left it there on his way to Detroit. You see the clichés: cars up on cinderblocks, to be sure, but houses up on cinderblocks, too. And you get a sense of the enduring isolation of some of these little communities: About 20 miles from Williamsburg, Ky., I become suspicious that I have not selected the easiest route to get where I’m going, and stop and ask a woman what the easiest way to get to Williamsburg is. “You’re a hell of a long way from Virginia,” she answers. I tell her I’m looking for Williamsburg, Kentucky, and she says she’s never heard of it. It’s about the third town over, the nearest settlement of any interest, and it’s where you get on the interstate to go up to Lexington or down to Knoxville. “I went to Hazard once,” she offers. The local economic-development authorities say that the answer to Appalachia’s problems is sending more people to college. Sending them to Nashville might be a start.

Eventually, I find my road. You run out of Big White Ghetto pretty quickly, and soon you are among the splendid farms and tall straight trees of northern Mississippi. Appalachia pretty well fades away after Tupelo, and the Mississippi River begins to assert its cultural force. Memphis is only a half-hour’s drive away, but it feels like a different sort of civilization – another ghetto, but a ghetto of a different sort. And if you stand in front of the First Baptist Church on Beale Street and look over your shoulder back toward the mountains, you don’t see the ghost of Elvis or Devil Anse or Daniel Boone – you see a big sign that says “Wonder Bread,” cheap and white and empty and as good an epitaph as any for what remains left behind in those hills and hollows, waiting on the draw and trying not to think too hard about what the real odds are on the lotto or an early death.

— Kevin D. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review. This article originally appeared in the December 16, 2013, issue of NATIONAL REVIEW.

"There is in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong, a love of truth and a veneration of virtue ... if the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice..." --John Adams (1775)

My last column, "The 'Gay Agenda' v. Liberty," outlined recent examples of how the Left's assault on marriage and family is a façade for their frontal assault on the First Amendment and, by extension, two of the most critical pillars of Liberty. The Democratic Party has cleverly seized upon the sympathies of tens of millions of mostly young and female voters, enticing them to become unwitting pawns who "feel good" about "gay rights." But the Leftist ideologues who now oversee the once-proud Democratic Party understand that the overarching strategy is to constrict Liberty and empower their statist politicos and bureaucrats.

As a follow up, this column focuses on how the Left canonizes "victims" of so-called "hate crimes" in order to expand voter constituencies. They do so by politicizing assaults against members of minority groups, which typically support Democrats -- qualifying those crimes as being of a more hateful class of offenses than the same crimes against others who are not a member of that constituency. The co-opting of these identity voter blocs follows the Left's tried-and-true politics of disparity paradigm.

For background, "hate crimes" today are the evolutionary political product of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which expanded the 1964 Civil Rights Act to outlaw any effort to "injure, intimidate or interfere with anyone [engaged in protected activities], by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin." The original proscription of such discrimination sounds reasonable -- but in the 50 years since passage of the 1964 Act, that reason has twisted to comport with Leftist political agendas.

For example, among the key protected activities in the '68 legislation are seeking entrance to educational institutions and equal employment opportunities, which, by way of legislated and court-ordered affirmative action criteria, created an epidemic of reverse discrimination -- which polarized the American people and further firmed up those already loyal Democrat constituencies.

But the current political "hate crime" classification is a far more insidious defilement of the Civil Rights Act than affirmative action.

I should state for the record that I believe ALL violent crimes are hate crimes, and no assault on a fellow citizen is more demanding of justice than another similar assault, regardless of the race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation of the victim. The notion that one murder is more deserving of justice than another is itself an assault on the principles of the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal justice under the law.

The Left's hate crimes hoax agenda is advanced by race hustlers, those awful opportunists who never let the truth get in the way of their political agenda. That was aptly demonstrated in the national crusade to elevate to "hate crime" status the self-defense shooting of a Florida hoodlum, Trayvon Martin, by "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman. That crusade was a political maneuver that dovetailed conveniently with Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.

Now, if race hustlers were really interested in the Truth versus manufactured hate crimes hoaxes, they would have been too busy focusing on Obama's hometown of Chicago, which, between the date of Trayvon Martin's death and verdict in Zimmerman's trial, recorded more than 700 murders of black residents, almost all of whom were killed by other black or "black Hispanic" gangbangers. But Obama and his racist cadres never mentioned a single one of those deaths, or thousands of such others across the nation, because those murders did not fit their political agenda. And now that the 2012 campaign has concluded, the race hustlers have stopped insisting that Martin's death be treated as a hate crime.

Fact is, the per-capita black-on-white assaults and murders nationwide grossly outnumbers that of white-on-black assaults and murders, but there has never been a national campaign to classify one of the former as a race-based "hate crime" -- not even in horrendous cases such as the torture/rape/murders of a young white couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom by five black thugs.

Unquestionably, in the majority of black-on-white crimes, race is a key factor, but you won't hear that from a Democrat.

While elevating rare white-on-black assaults to political "hate crime" status is an erroneous adulteration of the law, more fallacious is the awarding of that classification to rare assaults ostensibly based on sexual orientation.

Indeed, there is no more infamous example of the truth being trumped by the Left's "hate crime" constituency development agenda than the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. As you may recall, Shepard was savagely beaten, tortured and left for dead by two other young men, who claimed the "gay panic" defense, suggesting that Shepard had approached them for sex and they responded by murdering him.

Upon his death, the Left canonized Shepard as the poster boy for violence against homosexuals, a fitting cause célèbre to advance "hate crime" legislation. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) proclaimed, "Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement."

There were two plays, three films and a documentary about Shepard. Pop musicians including Elton John, Melissa Etheridge and Lady Gaga wrote songs about him. There was a "passion play" called "The Laramie Project," portraying Shepard as a martyr, which played in theaters and schools across the nation. It was "one of the most produced theatrical shows in the country," according to The Wall Street Journal. The Matthew Shepard Foundation became the hub for his legacy.

Ted Kennedy led the charge to pass the "Matthew Shepard Act," amending the Civil Rights "hate crime" legislation to include "sexual orientation." Obama ceremonially signed that legislation into law in 2009 after passage by Democrat majorities in the House and Senate.

But now there is a problem: Truth is trumping the myth.

After years of exhaustive research on Shepard's murder, including interviews with more than 100 people -- associates of Shepard, his murderers and their associates -- a respected journalist, Stephen Jimenez, has published his findings in "The Book of Matt." The book dispels the notion that the murder was related to Shepard's sexual orientation, and instead concludes he was a meth dealer and sex partner with one of his murderers -- both of whom were homosexuals.

Jimenez is also a homosexual.

Even the most prominent homosexual advocacy publication in the nation, The Advocate, in an article entitled "Have We Got Matthew Shepard All Wrong?," concludes that the new evidence significantly changes the popular narrative.

Its author, Aaron Hicklin, the homosexual editor of Out Magazine, asks, "What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard's murder was wrong?" He asks further, "Did our need to make a symbol of Shepard blind us to a messy, complex story that is darker and more troubling than the established narrative?"Aaron concludes that Shepard's murder was "a kind of hate crime -- just not as straightforward as the one we've embraced all these years."

Indeed, as I noted above, all murders are hate crimes.

I should also note here that, as is the case with "media blackouts" of black-on-white racially motivated assaults and murders, while the Leftmedia was saturating headlines and airwaves with news of the trial of Shepard's murderers in 1999, there was virtually no mention of the kidnapping/torture/rape/murder of a 13-year-old Arkansas child, Jesse Dirkhising, by two homosexual predators.

When asked about the disparity in coverage, NBC spokesperson Barbara Levinson said, "We did not cover [the Dirkhising case]. There are many crime stories that don't make it on the air." Likewise, there was no mention of the Dirkhising murder by ABC, CBS, CNN, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, or USA Today. And there was no coverage of the trial of Dirkhising's murderers.

Maybe for a handful of folks who are tired of being duped by Leftists. But for Obama and his cadres, their statist agenda will always trump the facts, and most of their low-info constituents are too ignorant to discern the difference.

So, where will we see the next expansion of "hate crime" interpretation in the courts and legislatures? Under Obama, the FBI's most recent Uniform Crime Report now defines "hate crime" as not just an act against an individual, but "a business, an institution, or society as a whole." Can you see where this is going?

The movement to define and convict "hate speech" as a reflection of "hate thought" is well underway. That interpretation will manifest itself in further constricting the First Amendment -- particularly freedom of religion, speech and the press -- and thus, Liberty.

The tactical "hate crime" agenda is about growing voter constituencies, but its strategic agenda is to play a key part of the Left's endeavor to undermine Constitutional Rule of Law, and redefine it with the so-called "living constitution." If they ultimately succeed in suppressing religious Liberty through constraints on "hate speech," then they will succeed in diminishing the most foundational understanding that Liberty is "endowed by our Creator, and they will then further advance the despotic notion that men are the arbiters of Liberty.

In order to escape their truly wretched past (click on the link for my short book on the subject), modern Democrats have adopted as an article of faith the bedtime story that, thanks to Tricky Dick Nixon’s “southern strategy,” the racists who had been the backbone of their party for the better part of a century suddenly switched to the GOP en masse some time around 1968, with the happy result that now all the racists are on the right. Presto — instant virtuousness and a clean slate!

It’s a lie, of course. But don’t take it from me, take it from my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson, who addressed this issue brilliantly last year:

Worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.

As Kevin goes on to point out:

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so.

And yet this myth persists — in fact, it’s just about the only response today’s Democrats have to their own sordid history: pinning it on the other guy. It makes them profoundly uncomfortable that among the 21 who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be found Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., the founder of the Hillbilly Dynasty; Robert “KKK” Byrd, the Conscience of the Senate; and Sleepin’ Sam Ervin of Watergate fame.

Just for laughs, let’s take a look at the electoral maps for 1968 (Nixon-Humphrey), 1972 (Nixon-McGovern), 1976 (Carter-Ford), and 1992 (Clinton-Bush) to see how the South voted.

First, 1968, as the Vietnam War approached its high-water mark and the antiwar movement was starting to roll:

1968: still semi-solid

Nixon picked up some of the states of the Old Confederacy, largely because of their pro-military tradition and support for the war. “Wallace,” for those of you born yesterday, was Democrat George Wallace, a rabid segregationist who founded the American Independent Party and ran for president on its ticket. He won 13 percent of the popular vote, and carried five states in the Deep South for a total of 46 electoral votes.

Four years later, Nixon faced the first modern Democratic Party presidential candidate, George McGovern, who ran on a “Come Home, America” platform, and on whose campaign many of today’s radicals cut their teeth. Two items of note in the linked video clip: Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton was McGovern’s first running mate, who got dumped by the Compassion Party after it came out that he had been hospitalized for clinical depression and had undergone shock therapy. The other is McGovern’s extensive quote from “This Land is Your Land,” a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary written by the communist fellow-traveler, Woody Guthrie.

1972: the Cod stands alone

Yes, the South voted for the Republican — but so did every other state except for Massachusetts, which was the first indication of just how far gone the Bay State already was.

Four years later, Nixon was in San Clemente in the aftermath of Watergate, and a Southern governor named Jimmy Carter, whose only claim to the White House was that he was not RMN, was running against the Accidental President, Jerry Ford:

1976: you can go home again

Yes, twelve years after the Solid South supposedly flipped to the GOP, here it was, back again, helping to elevate a native son past the Michigander. The two Reagan wipeouts of 1980 and 1984 began the alignment of the South with the GOP — but it was partly reversed by Bill Clinton in 1992:

1992: Back to Bubba

Kevin concludes:

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.

So the next time a Regressive tries to repeat the Thurmond myth, show him the maps — and make the Democrats own their history. They don’t like it very much, and who can blame them?

There is an awful lot of misinformation and untruth out there about the legacy of the two major political parties and the civil rights movement. Conservatives often like to use slight of hand, insisting that because the early Republican party was stronger in support of civil rights, this means that conservatives have the moral high ground. This is totally untrue.

Republicans – Moderate and Liberal Republicans supported civil rights. The Republicans who supported civil rights in America were not conservatives of the same ilk as George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. They were liberals and moderates, people like former Rhode Island senator Lincoln Chaffee and former senator governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Conservative Democrats opposed civil rights. The Democrats opposed to the civil rights movement weren’t Democrats with the center-left ideology of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They were, in fact, conservatives – especially from the south – with far more in common with Limbaugh, Beck, etc. than any modern mainstream Democrat. When people say that someone like notorious segregationist Bull Connor was a Democrat, they are technically right on the party label, but when it comes to ideology Connor and the rest of those opposed to racial integration were conservatives.

Conservatives opposed civil rights. At the time of the civil rights movement, outside of the parties, conservatives were opposed to the civil rights movement. Barry Goldwater, a conservative whose brand of politics would soon take over the Republicans in the guise of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, opposed civil rights law. He claimed that he viewed it as a states rights issue, and actually favored equal rights, but the practical effect of his stance would be to allow segregation – in the south “states rights” meant “Jim Crow.” The conservative intellectual movement – William F. Buckley’s National Review, for instance, opposed what they viewed as law-breaking protests by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Democrats moved left on civil rights, in favor. Over time the Democrats moved to the left on civil rights, meaning they moved with other liberals in favor of them. Southern, conservative

Democrats opposed civil rights and the laws were passed by liberal/moderate Republicans and liberal/moderate Democrats. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat.

Conservative Democrats left the party in opposition to civil rights and became Republicans. After the Civil Rights law was signed into law, conservative Democrats left the party. Strom Thurmond, who ran as a segregationist in 1948, became a Republican, as did Jesse Helms (who went on to filibuster against making Martin Luther King Jr. day a federal holiday).

Republicans used racial resentment for elections, while Democrats became more racially inclusive. As the Republican party became more ideologically conservative in the post-Goldwater era, they increasingly used racially divisive politics for electoral gain. The GOP employed what is now known as “the southern stategy” (acknowledged by GOP party chairmen Ken Mehlman and Michael Steele in the last decade) to demonize blacks and other minorities while also riling up the white, male conservative base that forms the party now. Examples include the Willie Horton ad used by Bush Sr. allies vs Michael Dukakis, the “hands” ad used by Jesse Helms, and the nonstop racebaiting versus President Obama from conservative outlets like Fox News and talk radio.

At the same time, the Democratic party became more and more racially inclusive. After civil rights passed, and the GOP became more conservative and increased racial demagoguery, black and other minority voters became Democrats. Every black member of the House of Representatives is a Democrat, and every black senator since 1979 has been a Democrat. The first black president, is of course, Barack Obama – a Democrat.

The parties have changed but the ideology hasn’t. The attempt to co-opt liberal support of civil rights has been a consistent campaign of the right, despite their predecessor’s opposition to the concept. The attempt to say that liberal Republicans of the past are the same as conservative Republicans of today, is just a terrible lie. Conservatives often try to say people like Martin Luther King Jr. would be conservatives. This is entirely untrue. In the last years of his life, Dr. King ran what he called “The Poor People’s Campaign,” and his beliefs would largely be to the left of where the modern Democratic party is, let alone the Republicans.

The Democrats moved away from the conservative position against racial inclusion, while the right moved the other way and has only recently somewhat acknowledged the moral folly of its past. Conservatives opposed civil rights, while liberals favored them. Both ideologies have inhabited majorities in both parties, but the ideological support or opposition to civil rights and equality has largely remained the same.

The article conflates 'civil rights' with a specific federal bill: "Conservatives opposed civil rights. ... Barry Goldwater ... opposed civil rights law. He claimed that he viewed it as a states rights issue, and actually favored equal rights, but the practical effect of his stance would be to allow segregation – in the south “states rights” meant “Jim Crow.”

'States rights' (in the US) is also a term that means following the constitution, even when it is not helpful to your political aspirations.

Goldwater voted for other civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960:

Wikipedia: Though he opposed forced segregation, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona voted against the bill, remarking, "You can't legislate morality." Goldwater had supported previous attempts to pass civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960 as well as the 24th Amendment outlawing the poll tax. He stated that the reason for his opposition to the 1964 bill was Title II, which in his opinion violated individual liberty and states' rights. Most Democrats from the Southern states opposed the bill and led an unsuccessful 83-day filibuster, including Senators Albert Gore, Sr. (D-TN) and J. William Fulbright (D-AR), as well as Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who personally filibustered for 14 hours straight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

Thanks Doug. I was only seven yrs old at the time so I don't remember any of this or would I have cared in those days.

Do I understand it correct though that it was LBJs pushing through the Civil Rights Act that caused this "sea change" in Black Americans party affiliation from republican to democrat?

I am not comfortable with leaving the particulars of Civil Rights for Minorities for State's to decide when we know in many states they were de facto second class citizens. This is the precise Southern argument that the entire Civil War was about state's rights and not Slavery. Sorry I don't buy it. That is a ruse and a cop out and a cynical ploy in my opinion. Most of us Northerners don't buy into this.I side with Black Americans on this.

That said, I don't know why they Blacks persist in supporting a party that keeps them dependent and has in reality done more to damage their families, self esteem, etc...

"Blacks mostly voted Republican from after the Civil War and through the early part of the 20th century. That’s not surprising when one considers that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and the white, segregationist politicians who governed Southern states in those days were Democrats. The Democratic Party didn’t welcome blacks then, and it wasn’t until 1924 that blacks were even permitted to attend Democratic conventions in any official capacity. Most blacks lived in the South, where they were mostly prevented from voting at all.

The election of Roosevelt in 1932 marked the beginning of a change. He got 71 percent of the black vote for president in 1936 and did nearly that well in the next two elections, according to historical figures kept by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. But even then, the number of blacks identifying themselves as Republicans was about the same as the number who thought of themselves as Democrats.

It wasn’t until Harry Truman garnered 77 percent of the black vote in 1948 that a majority of blacks reported that they thought of themselves as Democrats. Earlier that year Truman had issued an order desegregating the armed services and an executive order setting up regulations against racial bias in federal employment."----------------

What GM's Kevin Williamson argument demonstrates is that southern (white) Democrats did not jump to Republican for racial or racist reasons. There was no going back on civil rights legislation, as Goldwater pointed out. People like Al Gore Sr, Robert Byrd, etc. never jumped parties. The south went Republican in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, etc. when Dems went liberal in the big government way, but went Dem in 1976, 1992, 1996, etc. when Dems talked a more centrist path. A typical Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi or Arkansas Democrat had national political views closer to northern Republicans than to northern Democrats - on national security and on the size and scope of government. Rick Perry is an extreme example of how conservative a southern (Texas) Democrat could be as recently as the 1990s. He is not close politically to McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Obama, Pelosi, etc. of the national Democratic mold. That type of switching was inevitable.

"The election of Roosevelt in 1932 marked the beginning of a change. He got 71 percent of the black vote for president in 1936 and did nearly that well in the next two elections, according to historical figures kept by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. But even then, the number of blacks identifying themselves as Republicans was about the same as the number who thought of themselves as Democrats.

It wasn’t until Harry Truman garnered 77 percent of the black vote in 1948 that a majority of blacks reported that they thought of themselves as Democrats. Earlier that year Truman had issued an order desegregating the armed services and an executive order setting up regulations against racial bias in federal employment."----------------

What GM's Kevin Williamson argument demonstrates is that southern (white) Democrats did not jump to Republican for racial or racist reasons"

If it started during Roosevelt was it because of the New Deal? Truman capturing the majority of the Black vote might be because of the two orders you note.

I would suspect that one big contributing factor to the switch would be that Blacks began to move north at least after WW2.

So what was it? Economic? More social programs that benefitted poorer Blacks from the party of wealth redistribution?

I still don't understand. It does sound like the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the coup degra (sp?) so to speak for the Republican Party.

"What GM's Kevin Williamson argument demonstrates is that southern (white) Democrats did not jump to Republican for racial or racist reasons." OK so southerners maybe were more against big government than northerners. Perhaps that is why they jumped from Dems to Reps.

I still don't quite get the history of Blacks flocking to the Democratic party. Is it the Civil Rights OR (or and) Big government? It must be both.

How do Reps convince Blacks they are being sold out now? IF they think they have it tough now just wait till they have tens of millions from countries with far less opportunity than here who WILL work ten times harder and twice as long as them.

Yet they still cling to the reparations promise I guess. I still say they shoot themselves in their feet.

ON radio there is talk of a big behinds the scene push for reparations. This will keep the Blacks on board for another 200 years for sure or so it seems.

ccp, Interesting questions. Democrats successfully create and manage political and economic dependency and for some reason, exposing it makes us look bad and uncaring. This came from an unknown individual on yahoo best answers:

(5 years ago)" If you're asking what percentage of all Black people who are on welfare it's about 10%. If you're asking what percentage of all welfare recipients are Black it is about 30%. Whites make up the majority of people on public assistance. "

'Welfare' of course is a loose term. Warren Buffet is a welfare recipient too with his cronies at the White House blocking a pipeline to pump up his railroads. Much of my work is in the inner city. The problems I see are not racial, they are cultural, but blacks are hit disproportionately with the culture of not entering the productive economy and living off of this program and that with all the cash, hassles, limitations and unintended consequences that come with that. People become easy prey for votes to those who pump up the failed programs, namely Democrats. And with that, people are receptive to the hate speech against those who challenge our pathetic status quo on this front, namely Republicans. Resentment and entitlement are the American values taught to all races in these large pockets of failure in America that tend to be majority black or minority. I have invested in the inner city because I know these people have all the potential to rise up from this economic culture. (I patiently wait.) Democrats, judging by their rhetoric, programs and policies, believe they cannot.

Most important is how do we break the cycle, but I like that you are asking the hard questions about how it began which might help us to better understand the viewpoint.

A point I made a couple of election cycles ago is that we do not have to win a demographic group we are losing badly, but we do have to begin to measurably chip away at that loyalty. The Obama Presidency creates that opportunity like we have never seen before. Blacks got their candidate, as they saw it; they gave him 96% support and enormous turnout. Dems won the House, Senate and Presidency while the black condition worsened - badly. The people look good but their policies don't work. Can they tell us that this stimulus program or that got ten million off of food stamps. No, it is just the opposite. Trillions went through cronies while the rolls of food stamps and disability just kept expanding.

There are lots of articulate and prominent black conservatives out there, not reaching the channels and publications that most black people read. At some point that message needs more and more people behind it, a critical mass. Changing the minds of 10% of any significant group is tidal wave in politics. Just having two viewpoints represented and debated where there was only one, would be a nation-changing breakthrough. If you are black and you spend any time reading or listening to Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, JC Watts, Clarence Thomas, Mia Love, Walter Williams, Hermann Cain, Alan West, Ken Blackwell, Larry Elder, Bill Cosby, Tony Dungy, and on and on, you would be hearing smart people speaking honestly from the brain and from the heart. Racist is to think their message is not their own or that people from one group cannot accomplish what people from other groups already have.

On the other side of economic freedom is the contorted argument that capitalism is holding you back and it is government that will set you free. How is that going??! Great at the top, if you are David Axelrod winning elections or Michelle Obama in a $25,000 dress and jetting to and from Hawaii and the Vineyard. Not so good back in the neighborhoods where they, once again, 'got out the vote'.

"Changing the minds of 10% of any significant group is tidal wave in politics. Just having two viewpoints represented and debated where there was only one, would be a nation-changing breakthrough. If you are black and you spend any time reading or listening to Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, JC Watts, Clarence Thomas, Mia Love, Walter Williams, Hermann Cain, Alan West, Ken Blackwell, Larry Elder, Bill Cosby, Tony Dungy, and on and on, you would be hearing smart people speaking honestly from the brain and from the heart."

Thoughtful answer. Mainstream Blacks do go after their right wing fellow Blacks with massive fury. To White liberals the only people worse than Nazis are Conservative Republicans. To Democrat Blacks it is Conservative Blacks.

Yes, civil rights champions, you can admit Obama is a failed president Published by: Herman Cain

Yes, the election of a black man was a historic triumph for the struggle. But we do ourselves no honor when we cover up for the disaster of his policies.After watching the movie "The Butler" staring Lee Daniels and Oprah Winfrey, I have a better understanding of why some people are reluctant to let go of the hoped-for glory of Barack Obama's presidency and acknowledge his failed policies.The historic nature of his presidency trumps his failed policies in their minds because of the struggle, the sit-ins, the abuse, the senseless killings, the lynchings, the water hoses and attack dogs unleashed on the "freedom riders" during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

Even more black people are reluctant to let go, but I believe that the champion of the Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others would encourage them to let go, because they would not condone the social equivalent of spousal abuse. On the one hand, people are hanging on to the significance of a black man making it to the White House. And on the other hand they are enduring the abuse of failed policies, deceptions and now the arrogant trampling of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Just as the butler in the movie eventually let go of his anger toward his son who became a "freedom rider" and civil rights activist, it is past time for people to let go of their denial. It is time to face the facts so the future can be better than the past.

It took the butler nearly his entire life to let go of his anger, because he could never let go of watching the senseless killing of his father when he was a child. His father was killed for standing up to a white man who had abused his mother.

Yes, we must celebrate the good things in our history, but we must not hold on to the bad things in our history. Remember them, yes! Hold on to them, no! Let go!

History will record Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States of America. Some people want to quibble that he's not the first black president since his father was from Africa and his mother was from the USA. Get over it! The semantics do not matter.

If President Obama does not change his policies or his arrogance, which I doubt, history will also record him as the worstpresident, in terms of results, in American history. Historic federal spending, an un-recovered economy, blurred and ineffective foreign policy, a dependency nation, a health care disaster and a demotivated electorate are just a few of the historic descriptions that will be used to describe his presidency.

A historic triumph of getting to the White House is not enough to define one's presidency. It also takes results that will leave a positive impact on the nation.

Right now, it's not looking too good. Those who have spent their lives committed to the struggle do not betray that commitment by acknowledging that this is the truth. Indeed, they honor it. We can do better than this.

According to the statement, the idea for a Congressional ban on gay athletes in the NFL came to him after he watched coverage of Michael Sam’s decision to come out of the closet prior to the NFL draft. In recent weeks, Sam has been praised by many Democratic lawmakers, as well as First Lady Michelle Obama, who called him “an inspiration.”

According to the statement, the idea for a Congressional ban on gay athletes in the NFL came to him after he watched coverage of Michael Sam’s decision to come out of the closet prior to the NFL draft. In recent weeks, Sam has been praised by many Democratic lawmakers, as well as First Lady Michelle Obama, who called him “an inspiration.”

This story looks like a spoof to me. If it's not, it should be. The GOP does not oppose freedom of association, no matter what one 'Lobbyist' says.

I've been part of the GOP for a long time. I've been Chairman, Co-Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, Delegate, Alternate, Caucus Convener and Attendee. There is no position in the GOP called 'Lobbyist'.

Wikipedia: "A bill is a proposed law under consideration by a legislature." 'Under consideration' by Congress is a fact not mentioned in the article.

"GOP" is not mentioned in the source article at The Hill. So this is neither the GOP, nor a bill, just a stupid idea.